If Waugh had died after completing Decline and Fall, just as if Swinburne had died after completing Atalanta in Calydon (1865) or Poems & Ballads (1866), his reputation in English literature would still be secure, I think. Swinburne’s reputation in fact would be higher and though Waugh’s wouldn’t – he never lessened the impact of his early genius with much hack-work in old age – Decline and Fall remains an astonishing achievement not just as a first novel but as a novel full stop.

Though to be strictly accurate it wasn’t a first novel: that honour had gone to The Temple at Thatch, “about madness and magic”, which Waugh burnt in manuscript after his friend Harold Acton was unenthusiastic about it. The “magic” in question was black magic, so perhaps there is something Pagini-esque about Decline and Fall. Did Waugh sell his soul to the Devil in return for the supreme skill as a novelist that he would go on to confirm with books like Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938)?

It’s certainly plausible: Decline and Fall is not only extremely well-written in a deceptively simple style à la Hemmingway, but also extremely witty in a way Hemmingway never was. It tells the tale of Paul Pennyfeather, who is blown hither and thither by the winds of vicissitude but is ultimately weighty enough to settle into a sheltered niche. At the beginning of the novel, he is set upon and debagged by upper-class hooligans while studying theology at Oxford. With gross injustice, the college authorities promptly send him down for indecent behaviour, so he’s forced to take up school-mastering to earn a living. His first and, as it happens, only employer, Dr Fagan of Llanabba Castle School in Wales, is not shocked to learn the true reason for Paul’s expulsion from Oxford. “[T]rue to his training”, Paul confesses all:

“I was sent down, sir, for indecent behaviour.”

“Indeed, indeed? Well, I shall not ask for details. I have been in the teaching profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal. …”

But Dr Fagan is not sufficiently blasé to forget to force a reduction in salary out of Paul because of his misbehaviour. It’s a compounding of the original injustice that will happen again and again as the novel proceeds. At Llanabba Paul meets Captain Grimes, whose single appearance in this book was sufficient to secure him a permanent place in English comic writing, and begins teaching the son of the woman he will eventually marry.

But I won’t quote more and give more details of the plot, because that would spoil the book for those who haven’t read it. I’ll just say that Paul sees the idiocies of education from the inside, then resigns to marry and suffer more grotesque injustice. Decline and Fall should be read by anyone who loves prose and wit for their own sake. Imagine a Wodehousian farce written by a more cynical and sophisticated Wodehouse who was an even greater master of prose. Decline and Fall is perhaps the best first – or first-published – novel ever written in the English language. Or any language. High praise? Read it and see if I’m not right.

During much of the twentieth century, it was much easier for Romanians to live Nineteen Eighty-Four than to read it. Romania had a real Big Brother in the form of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918-89). And the ideology that once tyrannized the country might as well have been called RomSoc. The novel was (I assume) banned under Ceaușescu, but all things must pass and Ceaușescu was one of them. So Nineteen Eighty-Four is now available in Romanian in this attractive edition by Polirom.

I don’t like the image on the front cover, though. It doesn’t capture what happens inside but I suppose it would be interesting if the novel is new to you. I don’t know how good the translation is because I don’t know Romanian. But I can understand much more of this book than I could of the Polish edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four I’ve kind-of reviewed here. As the name suggests, Romanian is a Romance language, descended from Latin and related to Italian, French and Spanish. And if you have a good knowledge of Latin and Italian, you’ll be able to understand a lot of Romanian without ever studying it. The title of the book is mostly Romance, for example, though I didn’t see that at first. “Why have they chosen a new title?” I thought. Well, they hadn’t, I realized: mie must be related to mille, nouă to novem, optzeci to octoginta and patru to quattuor.

But Italian and Latin will only take you most of the way to mastering Romanian in quadruple-quick time. If you add Bulgarian or Russian to the mix, you’d really be flying, because Romanian has borrowed a lot from Slavonic languages. There’s an example of that borrowing in part of the book that any educated English-speaker should be able to understand:

In Romanian, “RĂZBOIUL ESTE PACE” must mean “WAR IS PEACE”, but RĂZBOIUL doesn’t look Romance. It isn’t: it’s Slavonic. Elsewhere in the book you might spot this: Oceania se află în război cu Eurasia şi în alianţa cu Estasia – “Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.” The change from războiul to război might help you work out that, as in Swedish, definite articles go at the end of words in Romanian. Which is odd, but Romanian is the oddest language in the Romance family. By no coincidence, it’s also the easternmost. I’d like to learn it, but I can say that of many other languages. This book was a fascinating glimpse into another room in the vast mansion of human language. And that mansion is not a totalitarian monstrosity like Nicolae Ceaușescu’s huge and horrible House of the Republic in Bucharest (now called the Palace of the Parliament). Instead, it’s a beautiful and mysterious place full of hidden rooms, secret doors and forking corridors.

And speaking of Nicolae again, how does Romanian translate that most famous of all Orwellian phrases? Like this: FRATELE CEL MARE STĂ CU OCHII PE TINE. That looks as though it means something like “Big Brother is with eyes on you.” It’s snappier in Italian: IL GRANDE FRATELLO VI GUARDA. Snappy or otherwise, the phrase didn’t serve its purpose. Orwell warned us about mass surveillance in one of the most successful novels ever written, but it looks as though he was doomed to be a Cassandra. This Romanian edition is another example of how he succeeded hugely as a writer and failed miserably as a physician. You might say that Fratele has got us nowhere.

But it’s not true of J.R.R. Tolkien and David Day. Whatever his merits – and my readings of Lord of the Rings (1954-5) and The Hobbit (1937) reached double figures long ago – Tolkien just isn’t a very good writer. He’s clumsy, he’s hackneyed and his ambition far exceeded his abilities. And so it turns out that David Day, the author of this short but interesting guide to Tolkien’s world, is a better writer than Tolkien. You could almost say that Tolkien provides the rough gems before Day cuts and polishes them:

Galadhrim

The forest that in the Second Age of the Sun was first named Laurelindórenan, “land of the valley of singing gold”, and later Lothlórien, “land of blossoms dreaming”, and even by some Lórien, “dreamland”, was east of the Misty Mountains by the Silverlode, which flows into the Great River Anduin. It was the Gold Wood, where the tallest trees on Middle-earth grew. They were called the Mallorn trees and were the most beautiful of trees in Mortal Lands. Their bark was silver and grey, their blossoms golden and their leaves green and gold.

Within the forest was the concealed Elven kingdom of the Galadhrim, the “tree-people”, who made their homes on platforms called telain, or flets, high in the branches of the sheltering Mallorn.

Woses

In the War of the Ring a strange primitive folk called the Woses came to aid the Rohirrim and Dúnedain in breaking the Siege of Gondor. These wild woodland folk lived in the ancient Forest of Druadan, which was in Anórien, below the White Mountains. They knew woodcraft better than any other folk, for they lived as naked animals invisibly among the trees for many ages and cared not for the company of other peoples. They were weather-worn, short-legged, thick-armed and stumpy-bodied. […] In the First Age of the Sun, these were the people who lived in harmony with the Haladin in Beleriand, who called them Drûgs. To the Elves they were known as the Drúedain; to the Orcs they were the Oghor-hai and to the Rohirrim the Rógin.

Nazgûl

in the twenty-third century of the Third Age of the Sun, in Middle0earth there arose nine mighty wraiths who in the Black Speech of Orcs were named the Nazgûl, which is “Ringwraiths”. And of all the evil servants and generals of Sauron the Ring Lord, these proved to be the greatest.

David Day writes more crisply and effectively about Tolkien’s world than Tolkien does, but Tolkien’s flaws may be part of his appeal. He’s subtler than I and many others have sometimes given him credit for, but he wasn’t a genius. Instead, he was an intelligent, conscientious and highly knowledgeable scholar who had a penchant for what he himself called “sub-creation”. There is only one true Creator, God, and only one true Creation, the Universe and the creatures that inhabit it.

But some of those creatures have the power to sub-create, that is, arrange the materials granted them by God into patterns of their own. It might be a statue or it might be a story. Tolkien was a sub-creator of stories – and of sometimes powerful art to illustrate those stories. He would have said that he was sub-creating in honour of his Creator and of Catholicism. If so, he wasn’t very effective. The Lord of the Rings is not known for bringing its readers to Christianity, let alone to Catholicism, but it does many other things. This guide condenses its appeal and helps you better understand Tolkien the Sub-Creator. There’s everything here from Gods, gods and goblins to Witchkings, wizards and Woses.

George Orwell: English Rebel, Robert Colls (Oxford University Press 2013)

I didn’t find this a very well-written or coherent book, but I thought it had one big thing in its favour: it doesn’t treat Orwell like a saint. The world-famous author of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) was not an infallible prophet nor a flawless logician. He contradicted himself. He criticized people for saying things that he would later say himself. He often got things wrong.

But who didn’t, particularly before and during the Second World War? And the irreverence shown by Robert Colls towards his subject seemed to me to deepen into hostility at times. Does the South Shields lad Colls have a chip on his shoulder about the Old Etonian Orwell? I don’t know, but all biographies are also autobiographies. If an anti-hagiography is the opposite of a hagiography, then Colls seems at times to be writing one. That’s definitely what John Baxter was doing in his biography of J.G. Ballard, but English Rebel is a better and more interesting book than that.

It’s also much more eclectic. I like books that can quote from the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety at one moment (pg. 224) and from Richmal Crompton at another:

There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ ’em jus’ a bit, but not so anyone’d notice, and there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves. (ch. 3, “Eye Witness in Barcelona”, pg. 95, quoting “William’s friend Henry” in Crompton’s William the Bad, 1930)

As a summary of politics in the 1930s, that isn’t so far off the mark. It certainly captures the spirit of Communism at a time when many intelligent and educated people thought that Communism was the only and ethical hope for the human race. Orwell agreed with Crompton, not with the intellectuals. As Colls points out, he disliked and distrusted intellectuals while being one himself and moving in intellectual circles.

But there’s another connection between Orwell and Crompton: they were both very good writers, still delighting and diverting readers long after their deaths. Orwell was the greater and more serious of the two, but literary criticism can’t explain either of them. It can’t say why they were such good writers and such pleasures to read. All it can do is discuss their ideas, their influences, their culture and their life-histories. That’s not enough and although Colls is a cultural historian rather than a literary critic or (worse) a literary theorist, English Rebel fails to explain Orwell’s greatness just as surely as every previous biography and literary analysis.

And “Englishness” is not a very interesting topic. England and the English can be, but that’s partly because they’re so varied. You might also that Englishness is unconsciousness. The people who want to analyse it or feel the need to go in search of it are outsiders in some way. Orwell was born in British India, which made him an outsider in one way. He went to Eton on a scholarship, which made him an outsider in another. And he had French ancestry, which made him an outsider in yet another.

But I’ve never seen any critics or biographers of Orwell make much of his Frenchness. It’s there in his features and must have been there in his brain and psychology too, because genetics influences both of those. And that’s where Englishness can get interesting: at the genetic and biological level. You won’t find any of that here and bio-criticism isn’t a big subject anywhere yet. It will be, sooner or later, and that’s when Orwell will be better understood. In the meantime, books like this are here to speculate and make suggestions. And despite his irreverence and hostility, Colls does seem to appreciate the greatness and the moral stature of his subject: “Orwell spent his life fighting those who wanted to ‘control life’ and ‘entirely refashion people’ ‘with an absolute authority which penetrates into a man’s innermost being’.” (ch. , “Life after Death”, pg. 224)

That final quote is from the Jacobins and the Jacobins are still with us, using ever more advanced technology to satisfy some very primitive urges for power and domination. Orwell understood the urges and prophesied the technology. This book isn’t worthy of Orwell, but I’m not sure any biography or critique could be. It’s eclectic and interesting all the same. And it’s got a good index and some photos I’d never seen before.

Sometimes you read a book, like it a lot, and start hunting down more material by the same author. And sometimes you read a book, like it a lot, and don’t do that.

At least, that happens to me. I’ve liked The African Queen a lot every time I’ve read it, but I’ve never hunted down anything else by Forester. I think I came across one of his Hornblower books once, set on the high seas during the Napoleonic wars. But I didn’t like it, so I was confirmed in my disinclination to try anything else. I think I’m wrong, because I doubt that The African Queen is a one-off. It’s the excellent and engrossing story of two nobodies, a “Cockney engineer” called Charlie Allnutt and a missionary’s sister called Rose Sayer, who pull off an extraordinary feat by navigating an old steam launch down an unnavigable river in tropical Africa during the First World War.

The book takes its name from the launch. So did the film, a cinematic classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. I think the film may explain why I’ve never hunted down more of Forester’s work. It was entirely self-contained and I’m pretty sure I saw it before reading the book, so it might have influenced my idea of the book. But the book would have been sui generis anyway and it’s better than the film. Books usually are and in some ways they can’t be beaten. There’s a magic in mere words that is intensified when words become silent, sitting as static black ink on white paper. An ancient part of biology, the eyes, collaborates with an ancient piece of technology, the book, to create a world inside the head.

Film is superficial, literature is submarine. It dives beneath the surface, entering the inner worlds of its characters, exploring their psychology, motives and history in a way that film can’t. But action can be important in literature too and Forester, like H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, can make the real world grow dim while you read. And this book dives beneath the surface in more ways than one. When the propeller and shaft of the launch are damaged in some dangerous rapids, Allnutt has to remove them for repairs:

The African Queen was moored in moderately still water in the eddy below the rock, but only a yard or two away there was a racing seven-knot current tearing downstream, and occasionally some whim of the water expressed itself in a fierce under-water swirl, which swung the launch about and usually turned Allnutt upsidedown, holding on like grim death in case the eddy should take him out into the main current from which there would be no escape alive. It was in one of these swirls that Allnutt dropped a screw, which was naturally irreplaceable and must be recovered – it took a good deal of groping among the rocks beneath the boat before he found it again. (ch. 8)

If he’d been by himself, he would never have attempted the job. He knows too much about machines, you see, and Rose knows too little: “He sighed with the difficulty of explaining mechanics to an unmechanical person.” But Rose’s ignorance gets them through. She’s the stronger character of the two and persuades Allnutt to try the repairs. To his surprise, he succeeds. Rose is an African Queen in her way and Forester is only partly ironic in naming her after England’s national flower, because she’s attractive in her way too.

But her attractions were fading, worn down by drudgery and subordination to her brother, when the war broke in on their remote African mission in a German colony. Her brother dies of fever, shattered when the German army requisitions goods and labour from the mission, so Rose wants to strike a blow for England in revenge. But how can she, a “weak, feeble woman”, do anything against the might of Germany? The arrival of the African Queen and Allnutt, “the Cockney engineer employed by the Belgian gold-mining company two hundred miles up the river”, gives her an idea. The two of them will take the launch downstream to “the Lake” and sink another African Queen, the “police steamer” Königin Luise that allows Germany to rule those inland waves.

Allnutt laughs at the idea of sailing down the river, but Rose persuades him to try and he agrees, thinking that he can easily sabotage the mission before it gets dangerous. But he’s caught up in the powerful current of Rose’s now unrepressed personality, and decides to do what she wants. He’ll do his best to get to the Lake. And here Forester becomes like one of his characters: he has “the difficulty of explaining mechanics to an unmechanical person.” It’s the mechanics of boating, navigation and hydrography. The African Queen is a quest-story, like the Lord of the Rings, and the best quest-stories read easy but feel tough. Forester has to write well to convey the hardships that his questing characters face: the rapids, the broken propeller, the ugly leeches that lurk beneath beautiful water-lilies, and the hot, stinking, malaria-ridden mangrove swamp that is the last and almost insurmountable obstacle before the Lake. Charlie and Rose have to pole and pull their way through the swamp.

Then they reach the Lake and the hardest part of the quest begins: sinking the Königin Luise. Forester has set up a grand finale and even threatens his characters with extinction, because the Queen will have to ram the Königin with high explosives in her bow. Charlie says that he’ll do it alone, but Rose refuses to leave him: “It all ended, as was inevitable, in their agreeing that they would both go. There was no denying that their best chance of success lay in having one person to steer and one to tend the engine” (ch. 14). And so they’ll both be close at hand when the high explosive goes off. In other words, they’ll both be killed. By then, that prospect will matter to you: you’ve suffered and sweated with Charlie and Rose, so you want them to succeed. The film brings you close to its characters too, but the film had to alter Forester’s ending. What works on cellulose doesn’t always work on celluloid. Literature is subtler, slyer, more sinuous, rather like a river.

And did Forester take the seed for this book from the sly and subtle W. Somerset Maugham? There’s a missionary’s sister, a working-class man, and a steam launch in Maugham’s short story “The Vessel of Wrath” (1931). And, just like Rose, the missionary’s sister in Maugham’s story is neurotically worried about rape, before she and the working-class man fall in love. The similarities are suggestive, but if Forester was influenced by Maugham’s story, he only took the seed from it. The African Queen has grander themes and is more exciting. And Maugham can’t write about action the way Forester can. Maugham was interested in psychology, not steam-launches. Forester was interested in both and a lot more beside. His wider interests make for richer reading and enhanced excitement.

And The African Queen is historically and sociologically interesting too. Forester was born in 1899 and his Victorian roots were still showing in 1935, when the African Queen was published. But he’s candid about sex in a way no respectable Victorian novelist could have been. There’s nothing explicit here, but his unmarried questers are lovers long before the climax of their quest. It all seems plausible: a novel is a kind of machine too and Forester was an excellent literary mechanic. If you’ve seen the film, try the book. It’s better and bigger and I really do need to hunt down more by Forester.

A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition, Anthony Burgess, edited and with an introduction by Andrew Biswell (Heinemann 2012)

Like a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange should be read for the first time as a battered old paperback. That’s the best way to feel the power of the words, to experience black print on white paper conjuring a world of action, excitement and ideas. When you read A Clockwork Orange for the first time, it shouldn’t have a glossary, an introduction or any references to the film. It should fly in your mind unaided, fuelled on nothing but Burgess’s invention, imagination and jet-black humour.

That’s why this “Fiftieth Anniversary” edition is not the best way to read A Clockwork Orange for the first time. It’s an expensive hardback whose cover refers to the film straight away. There are many more references to the film in the “Essays, Articles and Reviews” included as an appendix inside, accompanied by a glossary, an introduction and notes by Burgess’s biographer Andrew Biswell, a foreword by Martin Amis, early reviews by Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Ricks, various pieces by Burgess himself exploring the roots of and reactions to his book, including discussion of his own musical version, and an afterword by Stanley Edgar Hyman from “the first American edition” in 1963. Not good, my bratties, for a first-time reader. Especially the glossary. As Burgess himself points out in one of the essays: part of the point of A Clockwork Orange is that it brainwashes its readers into learning an elementary Russian vocabulary, in a subtler and milder echo of the brainwashing that the book’s hero Alex undergoes as part of his rehabilitation.

I hadn’t seen that parallel before, so the essay was worth reading. So was everything else, apart from the glossary of Nadsat, the teen-speak created by Burgess for the anti-hero and his droogies. Okay, the glossary had to be there, as part of the full academic package, but if it had to be there it should have gone further, giving full etymologies for all the words. Stanley Edgar Hyman gets one of those etymologies wrong in the afterword, suggesting that rozz, meaning “police”, comes from Russian рожа, rozha, meaning “to grimace”. Not so. “Rozzer” was English slang for a policeman long before A Clockwork Orange was written. Nadsat both imported Russian and adapted English, and Burgess based the ultra-modern Alex on the Teddy Boys of the 1950s. British readers spotted those local ingredients easily for decades after the book’s first publication in 1962.

But it’s less easy now and this expanded edition makes one important point in both a literary and a literal way. A Clockwork Orange is bigger now than it was in 1962. It became a cult, it influenced many other writers, and it’s now Burgess’s most famous book by far. And it was also, of course, made into an iconic film by Stanley Kubrick. I’ve never seen the film and don’t want to. I think literature and language are much more interesting and important than film. So did Burgess and you can pick up some of his resentment about the film here. He called it “a highly coloured and explicit film” in 1982 (“A Last Word on Violence”, pg. 305). And he later expanded Nadsat by adding the word zubrick, meaning “penis”, apparently from Arabic, and rhyming with Kubrick. But I felt resentment towards Burgess himself, because he disappointed me in this book. I had assumed that he was taking the piss of the Guardian-reading community when he put a keyly core Guardianista phrase into the mouth of P.R. Deltoid, Alex’s “Post-Corrective Adviser”:

“Wrong?” he said, very skorry and sly, sort of hunched looking at me but still rocking away. Then he caught sight of an advert in the gazetta, which was on the table – a lovely smecking young ptitsa with her groodies hanging out to advertise, my brothers, the Glories of the Jugoslav Beaches. Then, after sort of eating her up in two swallows, he said: “Why should you think in terms of there being anything wrong? Have you been doing something you shouldn’t, yes?” (ch. 4)

That “in terms of” is pretentious and redundant, as Burgess must have been aware. But what is Burgess himself using in something he wrote for the Listener in 1972?

The fact remains, however, that the film sprang out of a book, and some of the controversy which has begun to attach to the film is controversy in which I, inevitably, feel myself involved. In terms of philosophy and even theology, the Kubrick Orange is a fruit from my tree. (“Clockwork Marmalade”, pg. 245, reprinted from the Listener, 17th February 1972)

That use of “in terms of” isn’t as bad as P.R. Deltoid’s, but Burgess would have been better writing “In philosophy and even theology” or “In its philosophy…” That would have been more vigorous and direct, and so more in keeping with the vigour and directness of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a very clever and funny book and although you should definitely not read it for the first time in this edition, reading it here for the fourth or fifth time would be good. Inter alia, you even get a reproduction of parts of Burgess’s “1961 typescript”, with doodles and alterations. For example, Burgess changed “the dimmest of us four” in chapter one to “the dimmest of we four”. It’s a small but significant change in one of the best books ever written, though not one of the greatest, in my opinion. I haven’t reviewed it properly above, but here’s a badly flawed review of mine from about 2005:

Clockwork Crock

A Clockwork Orange is the story, written in an invented slang of miscegenated Russian and Cockney, of a juvenile delinquent called Alex, who hands out beatings and rapes for kicks in between worshipping at the shrines of Ludwig V. and Wolfgang M. After many blood-stained adventures with his droogies, he is caught by the police and conditioned by government scientists to respond with nausea to the merest thought of violence. Unfortunately, because the films of concentration camps and Japanese atrocities with which they condition him are accompanied by classical music, he also responds with nausea to the merest snatch of Ludwig or Wolfgang.

The state then sees the error of its way and deconditions him, but although Alex is now free to continue his lawless – A-lex – ways, he discovers, in a closing scene cut from the first American edition, that he is growing up and just isn’t interested any more.

And with that, Burgess thought he had said something profound and important about free will and the dangers of the then-current behaviourist solutions to crime and deviance. He hadn’t. As a piece of experimental writing, this book is very clever and entertaining. As philosophy and ethics, it’s infantile. Burgess’s intent is summed up in what he said about the title: “I meant it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness.”

The mechanistic morality is that of behaviourism, which regards men as living machines that can be conditioned by pain and pleasure to behave in appropriate ways: to avoid bad and seek good. But as the prison chaplain says to the imprisoned Alex:

“The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”

Burgess doesn’t seem to have noticed what he had been writing in the rest of the book. Why did Alex stop choosing violence? Because the thought of it made him sick. But why did Alex, before then, carry on choosing violence? Because the thought, and the fact of it, gave him enormous pleasure. And why was that? Had Alex chosen to receive pleasure from violence? Burgess doesn’t say, and the question doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.

Nor does the related question of why Alex is a young man. If free will is indeed this mysterious metaphysical entity floating free of the mechanistic, electro-chemical morality of the behaviourists, why is Alex a young man? Why does it matter that, as he grows up, he starts to lose interest in violence and think about starting a family?

When I read that ending as a very young man myself, I thought it was ridiculous: it spoilt the book. Alex should have carried on as he was, lawlessly flouting the rules of the society that had treated him so brutally. But when I’d grown up a little myself and I read it again, I saw that it was perfectly realistic – and it’s an interesting commentary on the maturity of American society that it was cut for that first American edition. Violent young hooligans, like the Teddy Boys Burgess was inspired by, do grow up and stop being violent, because they stop being young. In other words, their brains change. Burgess is happy to accept Alex’s brain being changed by age, but not to accept it being changed by the state, presumably because one is natural and implicit and the other artificial and explicit.

But both are beyond the control of the autonomous individual Burgess supposes Alex to be. What Burgess should have written the book about is whether the state has the right to do to an individual what nature does. But the state alters individuals by putting them in prison, so Burgess’s objection seems to be that the scientists of A Clockwork Orange alter prisoners efficiently and speedily. It might be a valid objection, if it were based on something other than a defence of free will. The chaplain says this to Alex too:

“What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed on him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.”

In fact, they’re neither deep nor hard, but they’re not answered by this book in either case and Burgess’s weak argument is not strengthened by hyperbole. Suppose that instead of nausea Alex had been conditioned to respond with boredom or indifference to the thought of violence. Suppose that classical music had not accompanied the films he was conditioned with. Unless Burgess is suggesting that beauty cannot exist without ugliness and pain, Alex’s before and after reactions to classical music are irrelevant.

Does he choose to listen to classical music as he chooses to be violent? But he listens to classical music because he gets pleasure from it, just as he commits violence because he gets pleasure from it. If he were indifferent to either he would not choose to indulge in it with the vigour and frequency that he does. In some very important ways we are machines, and Burgess’s title, like the book itself, is not the refutation of behaviourism that he supposes it is. Read it as fiction, not as philosophy, because as a thinker, Burgess was a very good writer.

Sympathy is an interesting word. It literally means “with-feeling”, that is, sharing someone else’s feelings, while the Latin compassio means “with-suffering”. But both of these words have weaker and wetter meanings in modern English. When I say that Maupassant was a compassionate writer who had sympathy for his characters, you need to read it in the older, stronger senses. He could feel with other human beings, victims and villains, the ordinary and the eccentric, and bring them to life on paper.

But he could do more than that: he had sympathy for, sympathy with, animals too and some of his most moving stories are about dogs, horses and donkeys. One, “Love”, is about a pair of wild birds and the hunters who shoot them. It’s included in this collection, which begins with “Boule de Suif” and ends with “The Horla”. “Boule de Suif”, or “Ball of Lard”, was Maupassant’s early great success. It combines three of his obsessions: prostitution, cruelty, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. The title is actually the nickname of a plump, amiable prostitute who befriends but is then betrayed by the respectable folk who share a coach with her on a journey through occupied France. A Prussian officer wants to sleep with her, but she refuses. He won’t let the coach go on until she gives in. Her fellow travellers force her to do so, then salve their own consciences by treating her like “a thing useless and unclean” when their journey resumes.

It’s one of the longest stories here and also one of the most powerful, finely observed, closely and compassionately written. And it’s echoed by another story, “Mademoiselle Fifi”, which is also about prostitutes and the German occupation. But this time the title is the nickname of a Prussian officer, a sadistic dandy who treats the French with contempt but gets more than he bargains for when he mistreats a young prostitute called Rachel. That name is Hebrew for “Ewe” and Rachel is in fact Jewish, so the revenge in the story has even more resonance now. She stabs Mademoiselle Fifi to death and then successfully escapes. But the story is less successful than “Boule de Suif”. It’s too obviously a wish-fulfilment fantasy and the victim turns the table too neatly on the villain. And if Rachel’s name is intended to be ironic, it’s a literary touch that undermines Maupassant’s realism.

I think I’d read the story before in French, but it didn’t stay with me strongly. Other stories I’d read in French did stay with me strongly, like “Miss Harriet”, about a repressed English virgin who commits suicide far from home, and “The Devil”, about a peasant woman who’s given a fixed price to oversee the final hours of a dying woman. “Miss Harriet” is tragic, “The Devil” tragi-comic, and both are good examples of Maupassant’s sympathy for women and his ability to write about them convincingly. But “The Devil” is also a good example of his sympathy for peasants. As the Roman writer Terence said: Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. – “I am human and I regard nothing human as alien to me.”

But many people can say that: Maupassant was one of the rare few who could translate his sympathy into powerful art, whether he was writing about an Italian widow avenging her only son in “Vendetta” or a French diplomat learning about the cruel fate of “the only woman I ever loved” in “Shali”. That story is actually expurgated: the French original, in 1884, went further than the English translation did in 1934. And Maupassant should be read in the original. As Gerald Gould says in the introduction: “It has been said by one rather acid French critic that one reason English people think so highly of Maupassant as a writer is because his French is so easy.”

That’s right: he writes with the utmost clarity and simplicity, but when I read him in French I have to concentrate, so the meaning blossoms more slowly and powerfully in my mind. That’s why I find myself unable to re-read some of his stories. They’re not extravagantly violent or cruel, but I find them too powerful and too unpleasant. “The Horla” isn’t one of those stories and although it is one of Maupassant’s best, some of its power comes from what you know about its background. Maupassant was beginning to go mad from syphilis when he wrote it. In “The Horla”, the human being he’s sympathizing with is himself. Not long afterwards, he was confined to an asylum. Then he was dead at the age of forty-two. No other writer has written so much so well in such a short life. Some of his best stories are here, but anyone who can should read him in French. He was a genius who combined simplicity with sympathy in a way that no other writer I’ve ever read has matched.

Nothing dates faster than the future, which is why I think Arthur C. Clarke does indeed deserve to be called one of the greatest science-fiction writers. Despite his cardboard characters and his adolescent psychology, his futures are still plausible, still capable of suspending disbelief, decades after he created them. At his best and boldest, he was a kind of optimistic, neurosis-free Lovecraft: Rendezvous with Rama (1973) has gigantic themes and images, but with irony and understatement too.

Man’s first encounter with an alien civilization doesn’t work the way it should, but that adds to the interest and the fun. Clarke wrote with gusto and seems to have lived that way too. He might have moved to Sri Lanka partly to indulge his paederasty, but he also liked the sunshine and sea he found there. The sea is a frontier, something that challenges and sometimes punishes the men who want to explore and exploit it, and Clarke’s writing is always about frontiers. His characters are always explorers in some way, part of an effort to expand into the unknown. Where J.G. Ballard dove into the head and explored the endless possibilities of mind, Clarke dove out of it, away into the universe, and explored the endless possibilities of matter. A Fall of Moondust is about a very simple form of matter in a very strange setting:

No one could have told, merely by looking at it, whether the Sea [of Thirst] was liquid or solid. It was completely flat and featureless, quite free from the myriad cracks and fissures that scarred all the rest of this barren world. Not a single hillock, boulder, or pebble broke its monotonous uniformity. No sea on Earth – no millpond, even – was ever as calm as this.

It was a sea of dust, not of water, and therefore it was alien to all the experience of men; therefore, also, it fascinated and attracted them. Fine as talcum powder, drier in this vacuum than the parched sands of the Sahara, it flowed as easily and effortlessly as any liquid. A heavy object dropped into it would disappear instantly, without a splash, leaving no scar to mark its passage. Nothing could move upon its treacherous surface except the small, two-man dust-skis – and Selene herself, an improbable combination of sledge and bus, not unlike the Sno-cats that had opened up the Antarctic a lifetime ago. (ch. 1)

There you can see Clarke’s greatness as a science-fiction writer. He took his scientific knowledge and created something new but entirely plausible from it: a sea of dust where a ship called the Selene sails for the entertainment and edification of tourists. It’s a frontier, a new place for man to test his engineering and his ingenuity. And the test gets very big when Clarke arranges for the Selene to sink. I won’t describe how he does it, but again he’s creating something new but entirely plausible from his scientific knowledge. His stories often creak psychologically and sociologically, but they’re always technically solid.

And he can mix macrocosm and microcosm. When the Sea of Thirst gapes and gulps down the Selene, her captain Pat Harris is overwhelmed by a childhood memory:

He was a boy again, playing in the hot sand of a forgotten summer [back on Earth]. He had found a tiny pit, perfectly smooth and symmetrical, and there was something lurking in its depths – something completely buried except for its waiting jaws. The boy had watched, wondering, already conscious of the fact that this was the stage for some microscopic drama. He had seen an ant, mindlessly intent upon its mission, stumble at the edge of the crater and topple down the slope.

It would have escaped easily enough – but when the first grain of sand had rolled to the bottom of the pit, the waiting ogre had reared out of its lair. With its forelegs, it had hurled a fusillade of sand at the struggling insect, until the avalanche had overwhelmed it and brought it sliding down into the throat of the crater.

As Selene was sliding now. No ant lion had dug this pit on the surface of the Moon, but Pat felt as helpless now as that doomed insect he had watched so many years ago. Like it, he was struggling to reach the safety of the rim, while the moving ground swept him back into the depths where death was waiting. A swift death for the ant, a protracted one for him and his companions. (ch. 2)

Death will be protracted for the crew and passengers of the Selene because they survive submersion, but have no way of making contact with the outside world: the dust, “with its high metallic content, was an almost perfect shield” for radio waves. So nobody knows what has happened to them or where they are, and for a time it seems as though nobody ever will. Then a clever but socially clumsy scientist discovers a way to detect the Selene. Rescue gets under way above the dust while the social dynamics of living entombment work out below it. Clarke is much better with technology than he is with psychology and the social side of A Fall of Moondust isn’t what makes it worth reading. There’s some disturbing and even disgusting sexism: one of the passengers is a trouble-making “neurotic spinster”, for example – and yes, Clarke actually uses that phrase.

And the private technology of the novel, as opposed to the public, is no good. In fact, the private technology is non-existent. The trapped passengers ward off boredom by pooling their reading matter: “the total haul consisted of assorted lunar guides, including six copies of the official handbook; a current best seller, The Orange and the Apple, whose unlikely theme was a romance between Nell Gwyn and Sir Isaac Newton; a Harvard Press edition of Shane, with scholarly annotations by a professor of English; an introduction to the logical positivism of Auguste Comte; and a week-old copy of the New York Times, Earth edition.”

The story is set in about 2040, but Clarke didn’t anticipate iPads and Kindles, so A Fall of Moondust is a curious mixture of visionary and vapid. You could see it as a thought-experiment: what happens scientifically and psychologically when a ship is submerged in a sea of dust? His science works well, whether the Selene is overheating or suddenly and almost fatally settling deeper in the sea. And there’s a characteristically clever and concise Clarkean touch right at the end, when the Selene has been successfully evacuated:

“Is everyone out?” Lawrence asked anxiously.

“Yes,” said Pat. “I’m the last man.” Then he added, “I hope,” for he realized that in the darkness and confusion someone might have been left behind. Suppose Radley had decided not to face the music back in New Zealand…

No – he was here with the rest of them. Pat was just starting to do a count of heads when the plastic floor gave a sudden jump – and out of the open well shot a perfect smoke ring of dust. It hit the ceiling, rebounded, and disintegrated before anyone could move.

“What the devil was that?” said Lawrence. (ch. 30)

If you want to know what it was, you’ll have to read this book. And I can recommend it. Clarke was not a great psychologist or a subtle wordsmith, but he was a great science-fictioneer. This book published in 1961 still retains its scientific and technical interest more than half-a-century later. A Fall of Moondust isn’t his best work, but it’s impressive all the same.

Grafting Greek onto Hebrew is rather like grafting an orchid onto an oak. But that’s what happened when the writings of a new religion were added to the Jewish scriptures to create the Christian Bible. Hebrew and Greek are very different languages grammatically, phonetically and alphabetically. As I said: orchid and oak. But those differences, and that disjuncture, make the Bible more interesting.

This is a good book for studying the differences and the disjuncture. Millions of people have done so down the centuries, but most of them have been driven by one of the most powerful of human fuels: ego. As an atheist, I’m motivated by an interest in linguistics and history. Which means I’m not particularly driven. The Bible is a fascinating and highly influential text, but studying it seriously demands more time and attention than I’m prepared to give. So I like dipping into this book, not dedicatedly delving:

MOTH

sēs (σής 4597) indicates “a clothes moth,” Matt. 6:19, Luke 12:33.¶ In Job 4:19 “crushed before the moth” alludes apparently to the fact that woolen materials, riddled by the larvae of “moths,” became so fragile that a touch demolishes them. In Job 27:18 “He buildeth his house as a moth” alludes to the frail covering which a larval “moth” constructs out of the material which it consumes. The rendering “spider” (marg.) seems an attempt to explain a difficulty.

MOTH-EATEN

sētobrōtos (σητόβρωτος 4598), from sēs, “a moth,” and bibrōskō, “to eat,” is used in Jas. 5:2.¶ In the Sept. Job 13:28.

As you can see from that, the Greek of the New Testament is set in the context of the Septuagint. The Hebrew of the Old Testament, on the other, is set in the context of what you might call the Semitic sea:

SWORD

hereb (חֶרֶב, 2719) “sword; dagger; flint knife; chisel.” This noun has cognates in several other Semitic languages including Ugaritic, Aramaic, Syriac, Akaddian, and Arabic. The word occurs about 410 times and in all periods of biblical Hebrew.

YEAR

šānāh (שָׁנָה, 8141), “year.” This word has cognates in Ugaritic, Akaddian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Phoenician. Biblical Hebrew attests it about 877 times and in every period.

But the Semitic sea was also a pagan sea: there’s a disjuncture here not only between Hebrew and Greek, but also between monotheism and polytheism. Everything in the Jewish scriptures, from the alphabet and the stories to the vocabulary and the verse, has roots in pagan, polytheistic culture. But Judaism slashed and severed, setting itself apart and creating something very powerful and perhaps very pernicious. The Bible is big in every way and this book is a gateway to its greatness.

A Radical New Interpretation of the Christian Message

Jesus.

Who was He?

The Christ.

What was He?

A carpenter.

Whence was He?

From Galilee.

Let us take His attributes one by one and see what clues they offer to the true nature and purpose of the King of Kings and so-called Lord of Lords. First, Jesus was the Christ: in Greek, ho Khristos, the Anointed One, translating the Judaic term maashiah, from the Hebrew verb maashah, meaning “to smear or rub over with oil”.1 And during His ministry, He would be closely associated with Olivet, the Mount of Olives. The key concept here is oil.

Second, Jesus was a carpenter: in Greek, tektōn, the skilled worker in wood mentioned in this New Testament text:

Matthew, xiii, 55. Is this not the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary?

And during His ministry, His teaching would often make literal or symbolic use of trees: the fig, the sycamine, the “mustard”, those trees bearing good fruit, those bearing bad.2 The key concept here is wood.

Third, Jesus was from Galilee, the hilly region of northern Palestine that took its name from the Hebrew verb gaalal, “to roll, to go round”. And at the end of His ministry, He would be crucified at Golgotha, the Aramaic form of the Hebrew gulgōleth, “a round, rolling thing or skull”, also from gaalal. The key concept here is roll.

And so we have oil… wood… roll… and stand trembling on the brink of a paradigm shift in terms of our perceptions of the nature and purpose of Jesus Christ and the religion He founded. One more text will suffice to tip us over:

John, xix, 33. But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs … 36. For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.

Oil… wood… roll… And a divine promise that Jesus would never break a bone… There is only one conclusion to draw: that Jesus the Anointed, Jesus the Carpenter, Jesus the Galilean was a skateboarder. A skateboarder who built His own ’boards of wood, lubricated their wheels with oil, and then rolled atop them with such skill that He never broke a bone even on the unsuitable road surfaces of first-century Palestine.

Straw Power

Though He occasionally had to get by — literally — with a little help from His friends:

Matthew, xxi, 6. And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, 7 and brought the ass, and the colt[, and] set him thereon. 8 And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. 9 And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.

This is clearly a description of Jesus skateboarding into Jerusalem between cheering crowds who have “strawed”, or strewn, a particularly bumpy road surface with clothing and foliage to ensure Him a smooth ride. This interpretation even enables us to solve one of the greatest puzzles of New Testament scholarship: Matthew’s seemingly inexplicable misreading of the poetic parallelism of Zechariah’s prophecy of this event:

ix, 9. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

Zechariah refers here to one animal in two different ways, and Matthew, unlike Mark and Luke, has long been thought to have misinterpreted him and supposed that Jesus was, grotesquely, riding two asses into Jerusalem.

But if we realize that “ass” — onos — was in fact a first-century slang term for “skateboard”, we clearly see that Matthew was merely recording something that Mark and Luke overlooked: a trick performed by the skateboarding Jesus in which, for some part of the journey, He rode simultaneously atop two boards. Today, part of such a routine can be referred to as a

Daffy duck: one person rides two boards — doing a tail wheelie [sic] with the front one and a nose wheelie with the back one.3

It is a difficult trick, part of the repertoire only of an advanced skater, even with hi-tech, easy-to-manage modern ’boards.

Jesus the Divine Skateboarder

But that, surely, is a fatal objection to the theory of Jesus the Divine Skateboarder, is it not? After all, first-century technology could not have met the engineering requirements of skateboard construction, which relies on a precise working in both wood and metal that was surely beyond the capacity of ancient carpenters and metalworkers. Surely? Not so, in fact:

The National Archaeological Museum of Greece in Athens possesses corroded fragments of a metallic object found by sponge-divers near the island of Antikythera in 1900. Complex dials and gears of the mechanism were unlike any [other] artifact from ancient Greece. From the inscription on the instrument and the amphorae found with it, a date c. 65 B.C. was ascribed to the object.4

The artifact was first misidentified as an “astrolabe” and only later realized to be “a computing machine that could work out and exhibit the motions of the sun and moon and probably also the planets”.5

Skateboards, then, would have been well within the technological grasp of the first century. But one might ask again: would the first century have realized they were there to be grasped? For it seems highly unlikely that skateboards would appear spontaneously in any culture, regardless of whether it was capable of building them to an advanced standard. In our own culture, for example, they appeared like this:

In the ’60s, Californian surfers bolted roller-skate wheels to old surfboards and used them to ride down hills when conditions at sea were against them.6

In other words, the first skateboarders were surfers. So did Jesus surf before He skated? Seemingly He did:

Matthew, xiv, 24. But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. 25 And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. 26 And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit, and they cried out for fear.

Clearly this describes Jesus introducing His apostles to surfing as the first stage of their journey to the higher truths of skateboarding. They are astonished and fearful as He seems to “walk” towards them over the surface of the water, shifting His feet on the surfboard to adjust His balance as He prepares to give the most adventurous of His apostles a first surfing lesson:

Ibid., 27. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. 28 And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. 29 And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. 30 But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. 31 And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?

And here we understand why Jesus recruited so many fishermen at the beginning of His ministry. Skateboarding would have been too dangerous for the apostles to undertake without an apprenticeship as surfers, but surfing likewise would have been too dangerous if some of them had not been able to swim and, when necessary, rescue themselves or their less natatorially inclined fellows as they all acquired the necessary skills of balance and footwork.

From Sea to Land

Once they had acquired these skills, they could transfer them to the more demanding conditions of “surfing” on land, where a fall or loss of control would mean not a soaking but a severe bruise, graze or even broken limb. The apostles’ apprenticeship at sea with surfboards meant that they took up skateboarding with insight and experience, neither over-cautious nor over-confident, but well able to fulfil the mission Jesus had mapped out for them: to introduce skateboarding to the world. In token of this, they were twelve in number, symbolizing on earth the heavenly skateboard wheel of the Zodiac. Here is the list of twelve given by Mark, for example:

iii, 16. Simon he surnamed Peter; 17 and James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder: 18 and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphæus, and Thaddæus, and Simon the Canaanite, 19 and Judas Iscariot, which also betrayed him …

Notice again how our new interpretation of Christianity solves another long-standing puzzle of New Testament scholarship: the precise significance of Boanerges, “The Sons of Thunder”. After all, what more appropriate name could be given to a pair of young and adventurous skateboarders?7

And perhaps it was even a nickname, given to James and John by Jesus because the two were such enthusiastic ’boarders that they were inclined to neglect the oiling of their wheels. Another nickname is certainly present in the list of apostles: that of Judas Iscariot. Many suggestions have been made as to the significance of his surname, including:

(1) From Kerioth (Josh. xv. 25) … (2) From Kartha in Galilee (Kartan, A.V. Josh. xxi. 32). (3) From scortea, a leathern apron, the name being applied to him as the bearer of the bag, and = Judas with the apron.8

The Oxford English Dictionary supports the first of these, deriving Iscariot from the Hebrew ’iish-qeriōth, “Man of Kerioth”. Kerioth comes from the Hebrew verb qaaraah, meaning to “to frame, build”. Does this suggest that Judas “had the bag” (John xii, 6; xiii, 29) because he carried tools therein and was in charge of repairing Jesus’s and the apostles’ skateboards?

Repairing… and Wrecking

If so, it provides an excellent explanation for why Judas was the apostle selected by the high priests to be suborned, to become the betrayer of his master. If Judas was in charge of repairing the skateboarders, he was also very well-placed to sabotage them and thereby end Jesus’s previous immunity from harm. Jesus’s enemies had tried to kill Him previously, but He had always escaped from them in some mysterious way that has, until now, been difficult to explain:

Luke iv, 28. And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, 29 and rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. 30 But he passing through the midst of them went his way.
John viii, 59. Then they took up stones to cast at him: but Jesus … went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.
x, 31. Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him … 39 … therefore they sought again to take him: but he escaped out of their hand.

If Jesus was on a skateboard and His enemies on foot, it becomes easy to understand how He escaped, particularly in the first case, when He had a good slope to pick up speed on. His enemies would have swiftly been left far behind, raging impotently at His speed and skill.

And vowing to find some means of turning it against Him. Hence the bribe they offered to Judas to sabotage Jesus’s skateboard: thirty silver coins symbolizing the way in which its glittering wheels bore its owner to and fro on every day of the month. By this stage in His ministry Jesus had begun to introduce the apostles to:

DOWNHILL: the easiest and deadliest form of skateboarding … Though anyone can ride down a hill at high speed, it requires considerable experience to do it safely.9

This is clearly described in the Gospels:

Mark ix, 2. And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain by themselves: and he was transfigured before them … (cf. Matthew xvii, Luke ix)

Remember that Peter was the first to try surfing, and James and John were the “Sons of Thunder”: these three were the most enthusiastic and confident skaters amongst the apostles, and obvious candidates for this initial introduction to the potentially deadly delights of downhill, in which the lithe, darting, alinear movements of ordinary ’boarding are transfigured into a headlong linear rush of pure speed.

Jesus in a Jam

In downhill, then, the ’boarder relies even more heavily on his equipment than usual, and a jammed or otherwise malfunctioning wheel renders him liable to a very serious case of

Road rash: bruises, gashes and other skateboarding wounds.10

In other words, the scourging and other maltreatment Jesus undergoes before His “crucifixion” are in fact allegorical of wounds suffered by Him in a downhill ’boarding accident that takes place after the Last Supper in

Gethsemane … the name of a “garden” or enclosure on the Mount of Olives, scene of the agony of Jesus11

Jesus has brought the apostles here to practise downhill ’boarding on the slopes often seen in traditional portrayals of the Garden of Gethsemane. The apostles, however, become exhausted and retire for a time, leaving Jesus to skate on alone, well aware that the ’board He is using has been sabotaged by Judas. We see this described, partly in allegorical terms, by Luke:

xxii, 41. And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, 42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done. 43 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. 44 And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

“Kneeled down” is a literal description of the position adopted for downhill ’boarding and “prayed” is allegorical of the ’boarding itself, a holy act that renders homage to God. But the prayer is cut short when disaster strikes: Judas’s sabotage is consummated, a wheel jams or falls off, and Jesus, sweating heavily from His exertions, is flung to the ground, splattering it with blood.

Rock and Roll

And now, finally, badly injured, unable to escape on His disabled ’board, He can be seized by His enemies and taken away for execution:

Luke xii, 54. Then they took him, and led him, and brought him to the high priest’s house.

Jesus’s trial proceeds, He is condemned to death, and led out for… what? Crucifixion? Nailing to a cross? So readers of English translations of the New Testament might suppose, but in fact there is no direct reference in the original to a “cross”: New Testament Greek uses the nouns stauros and xylon, meaning a “pale, stake or pole” and a “stick or piece of wood”, respectively.12

The conclusion? That the high priests sadistically and sardonically ordered Jesus to be executed with His own skateboard: injured though He is, He is forced to ride His repaired ’board again and again on the hill called Golgotha, “The Round, Rolling Place”, under the supervision of brutal Roman soldiers who force Him on with prodding spears and draughts of sour, re-invigorating vinegar. The result? That after a day of this enforced ’boarding, He “cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost” (Mark xv, 37).

And so Jesus passed from the Mount of Olives, the oil-trees, to execution with a piece of wood on a place named from the Hebrew-Aramaic verb to roll, and we have each of the three key concepts enunciated at the beginning of this article. The third, final, and most important of them will shortly appear again in the closing act of the Synoptic Gospels, when Jesus’s grieving female followers come to His tomb to perform the final rites of burial:

Mark xvi, 4. And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had brought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. 2 And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun … 4 And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. 5 And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. 6 And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified [ton estaurōmenon]: he is risen: he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. 7 But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee…

In Greek, “rolled” is -kekylistai,13 the same verb as is used for these stone-rolling episodes in the Septuagint, an ancient Jewish translation of the Old Testament into Greek:

Genesis xxix, 10. … Jacob went near, and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth
Proverbs xxvi, 27. Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him.

In the original Hebrew, the verb in Genesis and Proverbs is gaalal, and the play on words in Mark between “rolled” and “Galilee” would have been obvious to the apostles, as would its meaning: that Jesus had conquered death, recovered from His wounds, and gone away to skateboard on the rolling hills of Galilee. The Risen Christ is the Risen Skateboarder, King of Kings, and Lord, quite clearly, of ’Boards.

7. One previous suggestion: “the nickname ‘Sons of Thunder’ has been shown by Rendel Harris to be connected with the cult of twins. The sons of Zebedee were probably twins” (Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, notes to Mark iii, 17).